Religion Dispatches
…her version of the history of America. Her rapid-fire tours of historical sites is like the attention deficit syndrome version of American history. All photo ops and quick sound bites about energy policy, free markets, and American exceptionalism, then speeding off in an SUV. Topping off her day was a visit to Trump Tower, a monument to the Donald, whose comb-over was perfectly coiffed as he took pictures with Palin and Piper before having a dinn…
Read MoreKentucky made it official Thursday to give a planned Noah’s Ark theme park $43 million in tourism tax rebates. The Kentucky Tourism Development Finance Authority voted unanimously to grant the tax incentives for the $172.5 million project. Answers in Genesis, which built Kentucky’s Creation Museum, is behind the theme park. Gov. Steve Beshear defended the tax incentives because plans say it will create 600 to 700 jobs, almost assuredly just for C…
Read More…t. This story in itself isn’t a big deal. Each spring, incidents of school officials grumbling over the fact that they can’t pray publicly — and with a loud speaker — over the heads of graduating seniors are as common as wild honeysuckle vines. But what really irritates me is the public statement by a school official that kids who don’t wish to have religious views forced on them by their educators should just sit there and shut up. From the Bastr…
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…Laden’s death proves torture works. John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who authored some of the “torture memos,” wrote Monday in the National Review that “President Obama can take credit, rightfully, for the success today, but he owes it to the tough decisions taken by the Bush administration.” Yoo made the same argument in the Wall Street Journal, claiming that it was the Bush administration’s “intelligence architecture” that “marked…
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…ders pigs to be unfit for consumption (haram) and, like Judaism, it has no official ruling on xenotransplantation. While fatwas are generally derived from the Qur’an and Hadith, in the absence of both explicit and implicit rulings, scholars resort to Qiyas or jurisprudential deductive analogy to come to a reasonable conclusion on issues not found in the sacred texts. A.R. Chao, a former Imam in Texas and graduate of Vanderbilt Divinity School, su…
Read More…h for recovering progressive-rock long-hair, Jon Huntsman, Jr., to make it official and to make it a truly Big Mo-Publican Primary, but Huntsman’s fledgling campaign may have experienced another minor setback this week when two letters from Huntsman buttering up Presidents Clinton and Obama were leaked to the press.) Last week, Romney declared, “I believe the president was born in the United States,” winning high praise from MSNBC’s Chris Matthews…
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…e reporters from campus publications, and we exchanged notes a little. Opposite them was a brawny guy who almost immediately fell asleep. Though Harris read his notes from a gray MacBook, it was only Craig who had slides. This proved significant. Though the title of the debate was “Is Good from God?”, it didn’t appear on the default Notre Dame slide. Craig went first, and he displayed his own more formal title overhead: “Is the Foundation of Moral…
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As a senior official for Pope John Paul II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger envisioned a leaner, meaner church, with conservative doctrine and compliant faithful. Now that he is Pope Benedict XVI, his dream is coming true. Other senior churchmen, apparently unaware of the scandal that pedophilia and episcopal cover-ups have wrought, go blithely about their business of disciplining priests, nuns, and theologians. What used to be a large tent of a church…
Read More…oney continue to operate under Bush-era rules. In other words, there is no official monitoring function in place to ensure that organizations operating with federal grants do not proselytize, or that they do provide beneficiaries with secular alternatives. Under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Fatherhood Initiative gives out “capacity building” grants which are intended to “develop these organizations’ cap…
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…is that it is the first time in the American Catholic Church that a church official has been arrested and brought to trial. Church officials have never been legally prosecuted for the mismanagement of priests and the countless shuffling of molesters and pedophiles from one parish to another until now. That blow was dealt by Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams (dubbed “the avenging altar boy” by columnist Maureen Dowd) who is spearheading…
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